The 1933 German Towns Project
Compiled by Peter Landé
BACKGROUND
In the 1980s the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany wrote letters to
mayors and other officials of West German counties and towns asking them to list the
Jewish inhabitants of their communities in 1933, i.e. pre-Hitler, and, to the extent
known, the fate of these Jews. This collection includes the reports created by those
local towns received by the International Tracing Service.
The information on each individual varies in detail. In almost all cases, dates and
places of birth, as well as dates of death, where known, are listed. (In some cases
street addresses were provided but these have not been entered into the database). Where
it was known that an individual had been deported, this is noted, though a check of
other material indicates that the compilers were not aware that many persons on the
lists had been deported. Accordingly, researchers should always check other sources
of information, such as the German Government’s Gedenkbuch, before concluding that a
person had not been deported.
DATABASE
This database includes 46,739 records from 262 towns. The towns and number of records
included are as follows:
FIELDS
The fields for this database are as follows:
Record #
Source Town Name
Surname
Given Name
Maiden Name
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
Date of Death
Place of Death
Other Surnames
All Towns
Comments
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The information contained in this database was compiled from International Tracing Service files
held at the United States Holocaust Museum, collection 1.2.5.1 under the direction of Peter Landé.
A team of volunteers has been performing data entry work to create this data set. The volunteers are
Carol Baird, Nicole Heymanns, Gary Mokotoff, Hans Nord, Irene Peters, Vera Nagel, Peter Strauss,
Inge Wiesen, and Robert Winter.